Whoa, Stuart Sternberg is throwing down the gauntlet! He’s going to straight-up ignore his lease with St. Petersburg and, wait, why 2022?

Sternberg made his unusually frank comments in a question-and-answer session with the Tampa Bay Times while he was in town for an annual Fan Fest celebration…

Assuming it takes at least five years to build a new stadium, will you start a regional search without St. Petersburg’s permission by 2022?

Absolutely. Before that. I haven’t thought of a timetable, but five years is a minimum from the time you would start the process to when you would ring the bell.

So: The Tampa Bay Times asked Sternberg if, given that it would take a few years to build a stadium, and the Rays‘ lease is up after 2027, he’d start looking around for stadium sites a few years before then. And Sternberg said — wait for it! — yes, he would. Though given that, as Noah Pransky (yes, him again) points out, Sternberg can’t actually start negotiating with any other cities before 2028, as spelled out in that lease (which the St. Pete council is refusing to let him out of), he’d be limited to just looking. Which you have to figure he’s doing already anyway, right? So, not much of a story, probably the kind of thing you’d bury in the back—

With everything else that’s been going on (like me getting ready to be on the teevee), I utterly failed to welcome new MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, who officially took over from commissioner-since-the-last-millennium Bud Selig last weekend. (Yes, he’s finally gone. Yes, you are now invited to dance a bit on his grave.) And Manfred immediately showed that he knows what his job is, chiming in about how the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays need new stadiums, and he’s gonna help them get ‘em, by gum:

“I share your view that Tampa and Oakland are situations that need to be addressed, and believe me I will be making myself available to both owners, both clubs to play whatever role they want me to play in helping them get their situations resolved because I do think both of them are really important to the game.”

I’d give that about a B-minus as commissioner rhetoric goes — it hits all the usual points (teams need new stadiums, the league will throw its weight around to help get them) but without the flair of his predecessor: It’s no “Don’t make me come in there,” that’s for sure. Manfred should know that the job of a blackmailer commissioner is to always include at least an implicit threat, to let cities know who’s boss and—

“I think Montreal helped itself as a candidate for Major League Baseball with the Toronto games that they had up there last year. It’s hard to miss how many people showed up for those exhibition games. It was a strong showing. Montreal’s a great city. I think with the right set of circumstances and the right facility, it’s possible.”

When the team pitched a waterfront stadium in downtown St. Petersburg in 2008, a developer bid $65 million to buy the Trop property and load it up with $1.2 billion of mixed use construction. Property taxes and fees for the city were estimated at $7.5 million a year, with a like amount for county government and schools.

If yesterday’snews had you thinking that city councils were just mindless automatons who would inevitably rubber-stamp any stadium deal set before them, then the St. Petersburg city council had a surprise for you: That body voted 5-3 yesterday afternoon to reject the proposed deal in which the Tampa Bay Rays could buy their way out of their Tropicana Field lease to move to a new stadium elsewhere in the bay area for a payment of at most $42 million.

Given that as recently as a week ago, all signs were that the council was going to approve the plan that Mayor Rick Kriseman had worked out with Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, this was a bit of a shocker. But according to the Tampa Bay Times, Rays execs shot themselves in the foot with their answer to questions about whether the team would agree to forgo a split of profits from development of land on the 85-acre Tropicana Field site if they were in the process of leaving anyway:

Council member Darden Rice, who voted for the agreement, said the Rays blew the deal with their presentation.

“I think at one point we had five votes,” Rice said. “But I was very disappointed by Auld’s response to Karl Nurse’s question about development rights. It was either tone deafness or arrogance.”…

Nurse had asked Kriseman earlier in the week to change the agreement so the city could retain all development rights in that situation. But the Rays declined to make any substantive changes to Kriseman’s deal.

Nurse still voted for the deal in the end, but this did not go over well with several other members of the council:

[Councilmember Bill] Dudley said he felt like the Rays were making ultimatums. “I don’t like arrogance,” he said.

“The deal breaker for me was the idea that they want us to abide by the use agreement for redevelopment purposes, where they can benefit,” [councilmember Amy] Foster said, “but they didn’t want to abide by the use agreement” by staying at the Trop.

“This is a common strategy,” she said. “They use their mobility in order to threaten cities in order to get more.”

Yep, that they do. But in most cases they don’t have an ironclad lease like the one that the Rays are locked into in St. Pete, which currently doesn’t allow the team owners to buy their way out, or even talk about leaving, until 2027. That’s a hefty piece of leverage that the council has at its disposal, and they just used it.

For Sternberg, the logical next step in this situation is to haggle: If the council wants a bigger share of development rights, throw them a bigger share of development rights. Or kick in an extra million or two a year in lease-breaking payments. But it seems like the council isn’t opposed to the principle of the deal, just the specifics, so the usual strategy would be to pick off a couple of councilmembers and find out what their price is.

Try to pretend he never said anything about no further negotiations, and quietly resume talks in a few months. This would not only require swallowing a lot of pride at this point, but also leave him with a weakened negotiating position, since clearly his ultimatums wouldn’t be worth squat.

Sit tight and wait — if not 13 years, then at least for a new city council to be elected next fall. And then hope like crazy that the new folks are more willing to give you anything you want.

Sell the team and make it someone else’s problem. Forbes, which tends to underestimate team values, has the Rays worth $485 million, which would be a nifty 142% profit on what Sternberg bought them for in 2002. But presumably the Rays would be worth an awful lot more if they had a shiny new stadium to play in (especially if the shiny new stadium debt could be fobbed off on taxpayers), so Sternberg would be leaving a lot of hypothetical money on the hypothetical table if he took this route.

There’s still plenty of time — until 2027, really — for a deal to be worked out, so there’s no reason to start freaking out about the Rays moving to Montréal (unless you’re the Tampa Bay Times editorial board). The St. Peterburg council did send a message, though, that they’re at least aware that, as Jonah Keri puts it:

Up to Rays to incentivize St. Pete to cut 'em loose. City has a lease in place, and leverage, and is wisely using both.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable Noah Pransky has taken a look at what’s going to be the more important question going forward, which is how on earth to actually pay for a new stadium, whether it’s on the St. Pete side of the bay or the Tampa side. Pransky notes that the two cities’ chambers of commerce estimated back in 2012 that a stadium would take $300 million to $400 million in public money, and floated a bunch of different ideas for raising it: extend a sales tax surcharge for infrastructure improvements and redirect it to the stadium, raise the car rental tax, raise the hotel tax (note: possibly illegal under state law), kick back property taxes through a TIF district, kick back the local share of state sales taxes. Taken together these could certainly raise $400 million, but they’re also all money that could be used for other things, and once you spend it on a stadium, it’s gone.

So really it’s going to still come down to whether any government body in the Tampa region feels like handing over $300-400 million to the owner of the local baseball team, regardless of what particular tax revenue stream is allocated to it. Recent indications have not been positive, but the new agreement would give the Rays two years to announce an opt-out date from their Tropicana Field lease, which is … not plenty of time, but some time, anyway. Maybe someone will stumble upon a foolproof way to raise money before then.

“I’m not moving this team. I’m not taking this team out of the area. But that’s me,” Sternberg said at baseball’s winter meetings in San Diego.

“The chances of me owning this team in 2023 if we don’t have a new stadium are probably nil. Somebody else will take it and move it. It’s not a threat, just the reality.”…

Sternberg said he didn’t know exactly what they would do if the agreement is not approved by the council, but he certainly sounded discouraged by the prospects, adding that it could lead to the team leaving the market.

“If it doesn’t pass, we’re doomed to leave …” he said.

Sternberg has made threatslike thisbefore, mind you, but he at least then usually painted MLB officials as the bad guys wanting the team out of Tampa Bay. Blaming a hypothetical future Rays owner who doesn’t even exist yet isn’t quite a second-ever sighting of the ghost threat, but it’s still kind of impressive, given that he single-handedly managed to turn a day when people actually felt good about the Rays stadium situation (largely because nobody had yet thought much about the price tag, but hey, allow people their moments) into a hostage crisis in the course of a few hours.

Before anyone gets too excited about the Rays moving to Montréal on Friday if the council doesn’t approve this deal (whoops, too late!), keep in mind that the Rays are bound by their lease to stay at Tropicana Field through 2027, something Sternberg himself has acknowledged. Plus, if the new agreement isn’t approved by the council tomorrow, Sternberg (or whoever he sells the team to) can’t even talk to anyone outside of St. Pete about a new stadium — and even if it is approved, the Rays owner still can’t talk to anyone outside Tampa Bay before the lease is up.

St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman has scheduled a 10 am news conference today to announce his agreement on a lease amendment to allow Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to explore sites in Hillsborough County (which is where Tampa is, not where St. Pete is) for a new stadium. In exchange for letting the Rays out of the “can’t even think about a new stadium” clause of their lease, St. Petersburg would receive:

Payments would be based on how many years remain on the Trop lease if the Rays leave, starting at $4 million a season until December 2018, dropping to $3 million a season from 2019 to 2022 and $2 million from 2023 through 2026.

The Rays would have to make any remaining bond payments on the Trop, about $2 million a year. The city would cover demolition expenses.

So wait, St. Petersburg wouldn’t get any actual “exploratory fee” out of the deal immediately, just money if the Rays end up leaving before their lease is up? Since the earliest the team could possibly get a new Hillsborough stadium open would have to be the 2018 season, by my count that means a maximum of $24 million that Sternberg would have to pay to leave St. Pete early, plus $18 million in remaining bond payments.

Given that the Rays would have had to pay to break their lease regardless, on top of paying to get out of the no-looking-elsewhere deal, this seems awfully generous of Kriseman; Shadow of the Stadium’s Noah Pransky speculates that the mayor “must have felt his leverage was limited and the benefit of securing a deal now outweighed the risk of continued negotiation,” which sounds a lot like the reasoning being used to defend Billy Beane’s winter of trading everything not nailed down for a bucket of spare parts.

There is some upside to this deal for St. Petersburg: By making the Rays Tampa’s problem and potentially freeing up the land under Tropicana Field for development that’s active more than 81 days a year (giving Rays games the benefit of the doubt for being considered “activity”), it should more than offset any losses to the city from not having Rays fans drive across the bridge and buy hot dogs each summer. The question is more whether Kriseman, given Sternberg’s desperation to flee across the bay, got the best deal he could have swung — though given that Pransky reports that the St. Pete city council is ready to rubber-stamp this on Thursday, it sounds like everyone concerned feels like they just want to arrange a payout now, and sit back and let Hillsborough County fight about this from now on.

Pransky will be live-tweeting the press conference starting at 10 am Eastern, so follow him there for further updates.

“Can you imagine using somebody that’s homeless off the street to cash out a register and serve hot dogs? They’d be eating the hot dogs, stealing the beer, taking the money out of the register, and running down the street!”

Your homelessness charity director, people!

Atchison went on to blame disgruntled ex-employees and “a few former addicts that are telling him how horrible we are” for the negative press coverage, without actually contesting the central point of the Times article, which is that New Beginnings is pimping out its homeless clients to Tampa Bay sports teams, not paying them anything beyond their food and shelter, and pocketing any proceeds. Instead, he appears to be falling back on the defense that he’s a good Christian, so why are you picking on him, already?

On first blush it will appear that New Beginnings is a horrible agency, but after the dust has settled the truth about the great work we do will prevail. We at New Beginnings feel like we are under attack by the powers of darkness, but God is at our side to walk us through this.

And finally, this onereally needed to run sometime other than Thanksgiving weekend:

Before every Tampa Bay Buccaneers home game, dozens of men gather in the yard at New Beginnings of Tampa, one of the city’s largest homeless programs.

The men — many of them recovering alcoholics and drug addicts — are about to work a concessions stand behind Raymond James Stadium’s iconic pirate ship, serving beer and food to football fans. First, a supervisor for New Beginnings tries to pump them up.

“Thank God we have these events,” he tells them. “They bring in the prime finances.”

But not for the workers. They leave the game sweat-soaked and as penniless as they arrived. The money for their labor goes to New Beginnings. The men receive only shelter and food.

That’s right: The Tampa Bay Buccaneers (as well as the Rays and Lightning) have been using indentured servants to run their concessions. (Okay, not quite indentured servants, since these workers can — and do — quit their unpaid jobs and give up their shelter, but still pretty close.) That’s probably a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act — New Beginnings CEO Tom Atchison says the program is modeled on one used by the Salvation Army, but the Salvation Army doesn’t pimp its unpaid workers out to for-profit sports teams to make money — and undeniably skeevy. And it only gets skeevier:

[Victoria] Denton, the other New Beginnings employee who went to the FDLE, said she witnessed Atchison open homeless residents’ mail, take Social Security checks and deposit them in New Beginnings accounts, and use food stamp cards to buy food for himself…

“He would say, ‘They’re drug addicts, they’re alcoholics, they’re just going to spend it on cigarettes and booze,’ ” said Lee Hoffman, the formerly homeless minister who worked for Atchison off and on from 2007 to 2010. “The only way they get any of it is if they complain hard enough.”

Fox Sports’ Jon Paul Morosi celebrated his Thanksgiving getaway day by writing a completely speculative article about the Tampa Bay Rays moving to Montréal, in which he completely speculated about such a move, before concluding that it probably wouldn’t happen, though it, you know, could. The most contorted “look I just gotta write something before getting on a plane” part, though, was this:

The Rays’ local television rights deal with FOX Sports Florida expires after the 2018 season. So if the Rays assess the Tampa market for a year or so and decide there simply isn’t a viable home for them in the region, then it’s not as if a decades-long TV rights agreement will infringe upon their ability to relocate.

If you’re wondering how that makes any sense: That doesn’t make any sense. Sports franchises that relocate don’t have any trouble tearing up their old TV rights deal and signing new ones. And if anything, the Rays’ expiring Fox Sports Florida deal, which is one of the chintziest in baseball, should give the Rays more incentive to stick around the Tampa Bay area, since in just a few more years they could be looking at a nice payday from a new cable deal (because people love to watch the Rays on TV, even if they don’t got to the games). None of which really matters, anyway, because the Rays are locked into an unbreakable lease through 2027, and even if the mayor of St. Petersburg lets them buy their way out, any new lease almost certainly won’t let them look outside the bay area, so why are we talking about this again? Oh right, Thanksgiving.

“I think this will be a monumental lift to find a financing mechanism that would work,” he said. “I think the Rays would have to come to the table with serious money. I think it would have to be a smaller stadium, 30,000-35,000. I think the financing would be multi-layered from multiple sources. It’s not going to be simple like Raymond James (Stadium) was, which was one source of revenue that’s bondable over 30 years.”

None of that means that Tampa couldn’t ever end up building the Rays a stadium, mind you. Just that any such deal would likely end up requiring a lot of moving parts, probably with some combination of TIFs and tax rebates and those new sports subsidies that the state is throwing around and lord knows what else. And when you add in the cost of the Rays buying out their old lease, you have to wonder at what point owner Stuart Sternberg would be better off staying put at the Tropicana Dome rather than getting an incremental bump in attendance from a new high-priced stadium across the bay. Once again, you have to ask whether this is a team that really “needs” a new stadium, or if what they’re really after here is the public money that comes along with one, because hell if hardly anybody can turn a profit spending half a billion dollars on a new stadium in the same old market.